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Of course, I'm sure you've been on many decade long aerospace engineering projects to know how it should work.

I grew up around NASA - at the KSC and JSC. I watched as the US built up the space program from Mercury to Gemini to Apollo. I watched as Congress gutted NASA after Apollo and managed to create the kludge that is the Shuttle. I watched as NASA and it's contractors managed to get the Shuttle off the ground despite the roadblocks put up in front of if.

I know enough to realize that rocket science is hard and that Congress, as a body, is no more able to micromanage booster technology than it is able to manage, well just about anything. Congress has a near perfect track record of solving the wrong problem, solving the right problem in the wrong way which results in not solving the problem, and / or doing anything but attempting to solve the problem along with a myriad of other generic inabilities.

Congress should make general policy and let the people that know what they are doing implement it. Congress should NOT micromanage.

I watched as Congress gutted NASA after Apollo and managed to create the kludge that is the Shuttle.

In other words, even though 'grew up' around NASA, you prefer urban legends to facts.

I know enough to realize that rocket science is hard and that Congress, as a body, is no more able to micromanage booster technology than it is able to manage, well just about anything.

Had Congress micromanaged booster technology, you'd have a point. But the fact is, a reusable booster was on NASA's menu from very early on. Even while Gemini was flying, NASA was planning the Shuttle.

Heck, remember Gemini was itself a political creation. As Mercury was winding down, NASA management realized that it would be years before Apollo flew and that they needed some Buck Rogers to keep the bucks flowing, so they dusted off an unsolicited McDonnell (not yet merged with Douglas) proposal for Mercury MKII and justified it was 'a development program for Apollo'. (Despite the fact that the Apollo design was already frozen.)

I watched as NASA and it's contractors managed to get the Shuttle off the ground despite the roadblocks put up in front of if.

Roadblocks largely put in front of it by NASA itself.

Despite being clearly told that budgets would be limited in the future, NASA insisted on proposing an expensive Shuttle-Station-Mars program. When rebuked by Congress, NASA responded by promising to deliver a revolutionary new spacecraft on an extremely optimistic budget and an even more optimistic schedule. Many space historians believe that NASA had convinced itself, despite abundant evidence otherwise, that the austerity of the late 60's and early 70's was an aberration and that soon happy times and near blank checks would resume shortly. More than a few believe that, institutionally, NASA retains this conviction even today.

No, only a few years, but its pretty clear that this is not in the best interest of furthering space exploration, but rather in keeping jobs in a few congressional districts -- namely Huntsville, Alabama. Marshall Space Flight Center stands the most to lose if Ares falls through, but MSFC is in many ways a dinosaur of the Apollo era and hasn't transitioned to being a leaner, more efficient group.

Consider this: for the cost of building Ares 1-X, the test-flight that consisted of a shuttle SRB with some dummy mass on top and made up to look like an Ares 1, what was essentially the worlds largest model rocket, cost $450M -- SpaceX, has developed one working rocket and has almost completed a larger one for around the same cost. While obviously the Ares program will cost more than what a company like SpaceX will spend, since they're building bigger rockets to do riskier things, there is something wrong when a mere model costs that much.

The problem with micromanaging NASA through congress is that the only districts where its an issue that can make a difference in an election are the ones where they want to maintain the status quo, which is not working well. Everyone else who sees it and disagrees with its handling probably aren't going to swing their vote based on it, since there are a myriad of other, more immediate things to consider as well.

It's worth pointing out that the SpaceX Falcon 1, based on the same technologies as the Falcon 9, failed catastrophically on four out of five flights. Ares I is intended to have a safety record of one failure in a thousand launches. Comparing the two is fair, but they're definitely not intended to be equal products.

To elaborate on my previous statement, Wikipedia lists all five flights [wikipedia.org]. The last two in September 2008 and July 2009 were successful. The fourth launch had a dummy payload while the fifth launch had a paying customer (though they probably didn't pay much).

Three out of five flights, and the order matters significantly. The two that have been successful are significantly different than the three that failed. They added baffles to the tanks, improved the control algorithms, changed materials. They *FIXED* all of the issues that caused the early failures. Also, if its cheaper to blow up a few unmanned rockets than it is to design it perfectly the first time, then that sounds like the right way to do it. I'd consider the reliability of the Falcon 1 the same

Everything thats ever killed an American astronaut was an unknown failure mode.

Not really. Both Shuttle accidents occurred from known problems. Burn through of the O rings was a known problem as was the fact that the O ring material became brittle at freezing temperatures. The relevant engineers even tried to stop the fatal Challenger flight precisely for the reasons that destroyed the vehicle and killed seven people.

Similarly, ice strikes were a known problem. There were a number of times when the Shuttles came back with extensive damage to the underbelly. They were watching for i

Then I would argue that the failure mode is poor management and schedule rush -- definitely things not included in whatever safety numbers were quoted when the shuttle was being designed. The point is that whenever those 1 in 1000 numbers are pulled out they are almost meaningless -- the failures that did occur weren't included in those.

Its like judging the safety of a car on whether or not a freak string of events is likely to blow up the car on any given trip (or the brake lines fail, or your toyota acce

Ares I is intended to have a safety record of one failure in a thousand launches.

And many in NASA management intended (and claimed that) the Space Shuttle would have a failure rate of one in 100,000 launches. Then Challenger happened. It turns out that the error rate you get from probabilistic risk assessment often ends up being very different from reality. In fact, it was stated during the Augustine Commission hearings that the sort of factors which go into the sort of "one in a thousand" failure rate you describe for the Ares I in actuality only account for an absurdly small percentag

The language that effectively ties NASA's hands was inserted in the bill by Senator Richard Shelby, a Republican from...drum roll please.... Alabama. Where NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center is located.

And that language boils down to: "no changes". Subcontract a part of the crew module out to Russia, Germany or France? No. Not unless Congress approves. Even if it'll get Ares off the ground sooner...nope. Cancel or delay Ares I to concentrate on Ares V? Nope. Even though Russia already has, and will continue to have, the capability to put people in orbit thus rendering Ares I redundant, while what's really needed is the heavy-lift capability of Ares V.

Shelby wants one thing: Money in Alabama. So say bye bye to Kennedy Space center, and write off the US Government using commercially (read: private industry) available means to ferry crew to space. If SpaceX or Virgin Galactic manages to get people into LEO by 2015, NASA wouldn't be able to buy a seat without Congress' approval.

The 'no changes' language has nothing to do with getting into space or not, and everything to do with making sure money flows to contractors in Alabama.

The language that effectively ties NASA's hands was inserted in the bill by Senator Richard Shelby, a Republican from...drum roll please.... Alabama. Where NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center is located.

It's also worth noting that Alabama's NASA Marshall Space Flight Center, which is the center most responsible for the Ares I and Constellation, has a strong tradition of mass incompetence for the past 30 years or so. While I'm sure the engineers there are quite good, the MSFC management is incredibly horrible and has a reputation for clamping down on any sort of dissent from their engineers. They literally haven't had a single successful launch development project during the time that many slashdotters have

Of course, I'm sure you've been on many decade long aerospace engineering projects to know how it should work.

You don't need to have worked on aerospace projects yourself to know that spending $35 billion to develop a medium-lift rocket+capsule which will launch to LEO at a cost of nearly $1 billion per flight is a bad deal, especially when there's so much more cost-effective alternatives. It's essentially just pork for Alabama and a few other congressionally powerful states.

Right, let's just sit on our asses and wait for that Technological leap to appear out of nowhere so we can utilize the infinite resources in space. I mean that is how technology progresses right? Just sit on ones ass, somewhere someone will come up with the right idea.

Until someone makes a technological leap past chemical rockets, the resources of space are anything but infinite.

First, it's worth noting that chemical rockets are only really necessary for when you want a lot of thrust in a short period of time, like going from Earth to orbit or exploiting the Oberth effect [wikipedia.org] (for an object leaving orbit around Earth or some other massive body). There are other applications like station keeping (minor pushes to a satellite to maintain its orbit), course corrections (when you're on a trajectory, but need a little change in order to hit a desired window of opportunity), and applications

Chemical rockets are not that limiting. For example, there's no reason that they can't attain similar economics as commercial airlines. You have similar energy needs (a long passenger jet flight consumes a similar amount of energy as it takes to reach orbit) and similar roles (carry passengers and cargo on "trips"). The profound difference is that there's maybe a few dozen rocket flights a year at best while there are somewhere around thirty thousand passenger jet flights per day just in the US.

My view is that if rockets were flying at the same rate as passenger jets, fuel costs would be about a third of overall cost (as they are for passenger jets). That means roughly $300 per kg for vehicles using liquid oxygen and hydrogen or $100 per kg for vehicles using liquid oxygen and kerosene. That's well over an order of magnitude cheaper than today's price (and the cost goes down, if energy gets cheaper).

Chem rockets can't achieve the efficiency of jet engines because they carry their own fuel and oxidizer. Jets only carry fuel and thus need to propel less weight. Rockets also must generate enough thrust to support the entire vehicle weight. Jets normally fly at thrust-to-weight ratios below one, by having wings that rest on the surrounding medium (air, lift). Rockets must also propel their payloads under these conditions to ~330,000 ft. Commercial airliners reach cruising altitude at 35-40,000 ft. Th

You have similar energy needs (a long passenger jet flight consumes a similar amount of energy as it takes to reach orbit)

Wait.... WHAT? In what universe?

I was with you on the previous comment, but now you've completely derailed and started to roll. Your average jetliner holds less than 200,000 liters of fuel. The external tank for the Space Shuttle holds 500,000 liters of liquid oxygen, and 1.5 MILLION liters of hydrogen, for a combined total of 2 million liters of liquid propellant. So, on volume alone, it takes 10 times as much fuel to go into orbit, and that's without considering the fact that the H2/02 mixture releas

Even then, one could argue that really at no point does it ever being more than a "joy ride" since the amount of energy required is so massive that it's incredibly unlikely that anything could be discovered to make it worthwhile from a purely utilitarian perspective. In short, if one can't accept today that the things done by astronauts in space are more than a "joy ride", then I don't see how you could see any action by astronauts in space as more than a "joy ride"

Very true. Just look at that Captain Kirk guy. Sure, he had a great time cruising around the universe and nailing alien women, but what did he ever do that had practical applications? Nothing! The Earth government got stuck footing the bill for his joy-rides, while getting absolutely nothing in return. It's sickening.

You're confusing the ends with the means. The ultimate goal is to gain scientific knowledge and/or access to resources. This can currently be done more effectively without the additional cost of sending humans.

The only current useful purpose for sending humans into space is to provide an exhibition of national bravado.

What you see as nationalistic chest thumping I see as (admittedly often poorly done) continued development of technology to support frontier development. They of course see it as jobs for their district. Conversations about how we should do things first require an agreement on the goals.

To date, the main use of peoples' improvisational abilities in space has been to save their own asses when they got into trouble.

(Missions like fixing the Hubble telescope don't count, either. It would have been cheaper to build several Hubbles on an assembly line and launch them as they break than to send shuttle missions to service them.)

(Missions like fixing the Hubble telescope don't count, either. It would have been cheaper to build several Hubbles on an assembly line and launch them as they break than to send shuttle missions to service them.)

Might have been cheaper, faster and more effective. But the Hubble servicing missions DID give us practice in doing repairs in space. That is the sort of practice and technique we're going to need if we plan on doing anything in space that approaches 'routine'. Like go to the asteroids / Mars / Moon.

Saving one's bacon is a very strong motivator to getting something done. We need to do more of it. Or do you think that we won't have any equipment problems as we scale up our space activities?

(Missions like fixing the Hubble telescope don't count, either. It would have been cheaper to build several Hubbles on an assembly line and launch them as they break than to send shuttle missions to service them.)

This is an interesting statement. References?

The estimated cost of the Hubble was $400 million. From what I've read it costs $60 million to launch the Shuttle. Now these two numbers are rubbish, of course, because the $400 million I'm quoting is to design and build one space telescope whereas the $60 million I'm quoting is to put one already designed and built Shuttle into orbit. Of course, you can also say that one Shuttle launch costs $1.3 billion, but you can also say that the Hubble cost $2.5 billio

I think that non-human missions should be expanded to include things like general-purpose robots that could do repair work. For example, on Mars an entire robotic base could be set up over time with a power source, repair capability, spare parts, etc. That would still cost a tiny fraction of a human mission and would be able to operate many times longer.

And do what? Live? Currently we do not have the means or technology to build a self supporting orbital colony, or one on the Moon or on Mars. Spending more money on putting humans in space won't magically develop technologies needed to support life outside of Earth.

I agree that it is imperative that for the survival of our species that we have more than one home in the solar system. We can better work towards that by focusing on science, which outside of our orbit is most efficiently done with probes.

The technology doesn't appear out of a vacuum, it comes from decades of research and development. That R&D won't happen unless we put money into it now.

I applaud your enthusiastic support for the space program, but I feel you still miss the point entirely.

Space research and study can be accomplished with robotic probes. Human sustainability projects can be synthesized down here on old terra firma. We can even briefly simulate weightlessness, and closed systems and solar techs are actively being studied. Based on the numbers just pulled directly out of my ass, it would be cheaper by an order of magnitude to do both of these things separately than to do them

Exploit natural resources. And while a sel-sufficient colony on the moon or in orbit might be pretty hard, I doubt we'd have trouble building one on Mars. Especially if we stopped being pussies and put Project Orion [wikipedia.org] into practice. That would allow us to land basically an aircraft carrier's worth of useful cargo on the surface of Mars pretty easily.

But if the goal is to send people to space sustainably and for the long term, then NASA should be doing things like building and testing space stations that can spin and thus create artificial "gravity", and have decent radiation shielding. The long term goal should be creating space colonies, in _space_. Colonies where future generations of humans can live and reproduce. Thus the target would be developing technologies that would make it possible.

Not working on sending people to Mars or the Moon. Getting to the moon has already been done.

Getting people stuck on other gravity wells in the Solar System is silly and expensive. And talks of expensive, rushed (because of poor shielding and other issues), potentially one way trips to Mars are even more ridiculous.

What's so great about living on the Moon or Mars? It's not like they are human friendly places. What can you get from Mars or Moon that you can't get from asteroids?

There are plenty of asteroids to mine out there. Asteroids have a lot of water:

You might even be able to hollow out an asteroid and turn it into a space station.

Just because we're living on a decent planet doesn't mean that getting stuck on other gravity wells should be our goal. We should only get stuck in one if it's as good as Earth (or almost as good). And the other planets and moons in the Solar System are far from meeting that mark.

Getting people stuck on other gravity wells in the Solar System is silly and expensive.

I think your broad generalizations are silly, even if they are relatively cheap. Getting "stuck" in the gravity well of the moon could be a wonderful thing for our species, providing we can create facilities to mine the resources we need from the moon itself. In that case, being able to build and launch spacecraft from the moon would make future missions orders of magnitude less expensive.

Yes and no. Those 'meat sacks' are necessary to raise capital. Nasa has become a very political organization. In order to raise public interest, there has to be a human element. Without it, they lose funding. You have to have something that will fire up the imagination of the voters.

Sending a probe is great. Sending a human and claiming 'first post' on Mars or what not is historic.

If only Columbus, Magellan and all others that followed thought the same.

They didn't have remote probes. More importantly, their destinations were not in lifeless, uninhabitable, waterless vacuums.

Going into space was always about *pushing* boundaries. You are NOT doing that with freaking robots!

Sure we are. For example, a mission to drill down into the liquid oceans of Europa would push plenty of boundaries (and would be totally impossible for humans anyway).

But we don't have any data on *how* to survive someplace like the Moon.

So what? We don't need to know how to do that unless we find a valid reason have anybody live there. It's a waste of valuable resources to figure it out now.

Apollo program resulted in computers (I guess that was a non-cost effective problem). If it wasn't for Apollo, NO ONE would fund the early silicon fabs. It would continue to advance at the pace of current fusion research.

It would be a lot cheaper and safer to send a repair robot than a human to fix things that break. However, very few robotic probes are even worth the cost of fixing, especially when the fixing involves humans. Just send another one.

As I pointed out above on this thread, it would have been cheaper to produce several Hubbles and send up new ones when the old ones broke than to fix them with missions in the ridiculously risky and expensive space shuttle.

Just sit on ones ass, somewhere someone will come up with the right idea.

No, first we need a global nuclear war that kills hundreds of millions of people. Then we need a drunk who wants to make enough money to retire to an island filled with naked women. Added bonus if he hates flying so much that he takes trains and has never been into space.

Name one thing that has been launched into space without using a fuckload of money. There aren't any. This is because shooting things into space is fucking hard and requires a fuckload of power. This fuckload of power requires a shit-ton of money to buy. The reason for this is because there's no source of power that's cheap, small enough to fit inside a rocket, and can produce enough power to launch the rocket into space.Assumptions aren't assumptions if they're proven facts. It's been proven repeatedl

Yeah, those DoD contracts where he actually (attempted) to put stuff in orbit...what pork! They weren't paying him for power point slides...

Apparently Falcon 1 / SpaceX startup costs are around $450M, which is about what that recent Ares I-X test flight costs. You think there might be a little difference in the overhead of the two operations?

I'm not arguing against the conservation of energy, (yeah lots of energy to get something to LEO), just that there might be a better way.

No, it's important to congress to see expected goals met, since they've been funneling billions of dollars into NASA with the understanding that they're investing in programs like Constellation. NASA is funded by congress, not slashdot.

In the long run, the best way to cut port would be deliberative democracy, meaning a citizens line item veto by jury trial.

You might for example eliminate the presidential veto but say that all laws must pass a jury trial with a large enough jury that you don't need jury selection, like say 100 to 200 people. Any group of 10% of the house or senate or 5% of each could send an advocate to argue for or against all or part of the law, and the president could send an advocate or even appear himself. If the la

I recall a story that the ill-fated solid booster rockets could have and should have been built in one piece near the launch site, but they were farmed out to Hatch's home state of Utah for political reasons. Transportation from there meant that they had to be built in segments joined with O-rings.

Well, it can be a little more subtle than that. Eisenhower described the process thusly:

Politicians are concerned about the welfare of their constituents. During wartime/other massive government spending in industry, more and more of those constituents become financially dependent on military/government contractor industry for jobs. To act in the best interest of their constituents, politicians are compelled to continue war, or to make other kinds of major fiscal decisions benefiting those industries.

By promoting massive, wasteful spending on NASA, many politicians could be actively seeking the immediate best interest of their constituents.

Well, color me shocked. You just repeated the talking points of a Republican and didn't get modded into oblivion. Even more surprising is that it got a +5 Insightful. I wonder if the groupthink is waning, or if it is that no one knew that Eisenhower was actually a Republican. My guess is most people here didn't know he was a Republican since he sounds so different than the current breed.

For those of you watching at home... Go look up the speech that this came from. The man had no kind words for the mil

My favorite is when I hear die hard lefties explaining the military should just refuse to do XYZ. I just go up and ask "So you think the military should just not do what they were told?" and their empty heads typically start bobbing up and down. Then I explain that if the military is deciding what to do and what not to do that they are actually the ones running the show. That what they are advocating is a military coup. Then I ask them to please visit their local library or book store and go look up how

But those projects are funded by the taxes of the consituents, so it's not in the interests of the constituency to spend the money just for the sake of employment. That's like borrowing money on a credit card to pay off your mortgage. Besides which it doesn't even work as a means of wealth redistribution. People pay their taxes which the government ploughs into weaponry in return for which you also get some jobs for workers, but a large amount of that money gets skimmed off and into the pockets of rich peo

it's only a contradiction of you consider the constituents to be the people rather than big business

large amount of that money gets skimmed off and into the pockets of rich people.

i do believe you've hit the nail on the head. legislators are aware that this is how their policies work, as activists, economists, and journalist have brought it to their attention many times. if you consider "jobs" to be a euphemism for "constituent profit", keeping the true constituents in mind, it is a very effective policy

The Obama administration still clings to the idea that the world is a friendly place full of pink unicorns and people who want to be all huggy-kissy with everyone else. There's no reason to develop technology more advanced than other countries'; we'll all play nice together like happy socialists are supposed to and not compete like evil capitalists.

By most accounts, Obama is actually a centrist. The far right has painted him as a mad spender because of the stimulus package, but that was actually a mainstream economist viewpoint also, not just left-wing economists. And the stimulus package also had tax-cuts.

Yea, because Clinton's policy of ignoring problems worked out so well for the US, about the same as appeasement did throughout the last century. Obama has brought it to a new level with his "bend over" foreign policy.

Who specifically are you referring to when you say "those who used to be our friends"? Our relationship with China was better under Bush than it had ever been. Muslim countries? Never been great, but the moderates are still as friendly as can be expected. You blame Bush for Putin's policies in

Dropping a few cruise missiles into an abandoned training camp in Afganistan was really effective wasn't it? And trying to ignore the "little war" in Kosovo until it turned into a genocide was great leadership.

But your bluster is just a feeble attempt to change the focus from Obama's failure to lead. His predecessors kept a sign on their desk in the Oval Office that read "The Buck Stops Here". I'm so tired of seeing him and Hillary and Emanuel and Gibbs pointing fingers. The theme of the current administrat

And trying to ignore the "little war" in Kosovo until it turned into a genocide was great leadership.

the vast majority of serbian massacres of albanian civilians occurred only after the nato bombing had begun, as was predicted would happen in response to a nato attack. justifying military action on the basis of atrocities committed afterwards is dishonest at best

I know it's easy to not pay attention to how things went and imagine that the second Bush term was the same as the first, but it's not true. In his second term, Bush started working with foreign governments instead of fighting with them (Angela Merkel or Nikolas Sarkozy). He got rid of his bad advisors (Donald Rumsfeld) and started working with people who knew how to clean up the messes started in the first term (General Petraeus totally turned around the situation in Iraq).

Good lord, is that just some rhetorical flourish, or do you really believe that Obama's rhetoric is that of a "European socialist"? If so, try getting your information from somewhere besides Fox News. Like his own speeches and books. Even if you don't believe what he says, I think you'll find what he actually says is quite a bit different from what the right-wing pundits say he says.

I agree that that the measures Gates has taken are puny compared with what needs to be done. But the fact that he's done anyth

Congressional action on an appropriation measure is not complete until both the House and Senate have successfully disposed of all amendments between the Houses eventually agreeing on an identical text pursuant to the Constitution - at which point the President acts on the bill.

NASA has always been used as a pork barrel, and the engineers who just want to fly birds have both used that shamelessly to get funded, and been victimized by it, in equal turns. It's hard to guess whether they would have created cheaper, simpler designs if feeding billions into the industrial complex (in all 50 states as often as possible) were not the more important goal than flying.

Bottom line, I find it hard to cheer for either side when these spats come up. You always want to take the side of the homies (fund NASA, fly something cool somewhere), but NASA is spending so many millions per kilogram flown that the whole thing will ALWAYS be for a lucky tiny few as long as their big-iron design philosophy is enabled by those who LIVE to spend tax dollars (in their state).

Silver lining though: Americans may have forgotten that their Congress has the power to tell the Executive branch "NO!". That the founders considered the legislature, NOT the executive, the first among three equals, because it directly represents the people on the most frequent election cycle.

Who knows, this "make the executive branch moves illegal" power, now revived for the first time in years, may one day be used to make torture, fake intelligence, and war itself less likely instead of perfectly acceptable.

While Congress can allocate funds, nothing compels the executive branch to spend them.

If the president can chose not to follow Congress's direction on spending, then Congress can chose to impeach and remove the president. They can also retaliate in more subtle ways say by gutting some program the president values.

Please tell me you did not type that with a straight face? Impeachment? If condoning the kidnapping and torture of people is not a high crime or misdemeanor, I'm pretty sure that exercising the Executive's rights within checks and balances isn't either.

There are two numbers which are not changing: the energy in chemical rocket fuel and the mass of the earth. Those two dictate that about 90% of a rocket's liftoff mass be fuel.... (and yes, I was a rocket scientist, with Boeing, in Huntsville AL for many years, but retired now)

As a rocket scientist then, I'm sure you realize that fuel is ~1% of the total cost of launching a rocket. By far most of the cost goes to paying the personnel working on the ground who assemble and maintain the rocket. Much of why the Ares I costs so much is because it intentionally doesn't do anything to maximize personnel efficiency (more people required == more jobs).